At the New Republic, Jamil Smith discusses the New York Times’s coverage of race, specifically its reassignment of Tanzina Vega from the race beat, which she had suggested herself, to the metropolitan section, and the more general tendency of papers across the country to shutter their race beats. Smith quotes Cord Jefferson, who wrote a …

Bibi DeitzAndre Dubus's literary superpower is to hit upon that one thing about a character that makes him him, or her her. And in so doing, with subtle, clever details—breadcrumbs on the trail to the nucleus …

What's the use of getting over things? Wrongs have been perpetrated: assaults on your dignity, your self-image, your fragile well-being. And they've gotten away with it—they're reveling (no doubt prospering), smug in their galling impunity, probably laughing at you even now. …

In Miranda July's films and short stories, the protagonist is usually shut off from the world: insular, habit-prone, and to the outside world, a little weird, The beauty of Cheryl Glickman, the narrator of July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, is that she's come to see her idiosyncrasies as totally logical, After reading several pages of Cheryl's chatty internal monologue, the reader will, too.

"I told my wife, 'Baby, I want to write twenty books,' and it's not a boast; it's because I believe in the Zen process. You know, if you rake a garden for fifty years, insight comes. My struggle right now is to make it no struggle. If I can do that, I can be a machine. I want to keep pumping out books because rarely can you just knock out a homerun. A perfect book only happens if you roll the dice a bunch of times. Take Cormac McCarthy